Posts for 2016

Apparently borrowing a page from the Trump playbook, the outgoing Obama administration filed a new trade enforcement action with the World Trade Organization against China earlier this month, alleging that the country has not met its market access commitments to the WTO for rice, wheat and corn.

Sometimes, it’s the little things. Sometimes, the little thing might be less than six inches long.

When the price of oil started falling, everybody wanted to know what the breakeven price was in US shale plays; there seemed to be a general consensus that if you said $70, you’d sound reasonably intelligent. More recently, my colleague Carin Dehne Kiley of S&P Ratings wrote a thorough analysis that said when you figure in natural gas value and average interest expense, the “required wellhead oil price” was $55.

In July 2014, as the Obama administration was really beginning to work through its future plan for offshore oil and gas leasing, the industry was hopeful that the plan would include expanded drilling in nearly all US Gulf of Mexico waters, much of offshore Alaska and even off the East Coast.

Nigeria’s Petroleum Investment Bill (PIB) is finally starting to make some progress through parliament. The Senate approved it after a second reading in November and now parliamentary committees are preparing their final reports before the third and final reading. Senate President Bukola Saraki said they aim to have the bill “signed, sealed and delivered for the benefit of the Nigerian public early in 2017.”

We all know the scene in the National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation movie where the switch is finally flipped on and Clark W. Griswold’s 250 strands of bulbs burst into light causing a rolling blackout.

Following Griswold’s calamity is a scene where a hand switches on the “auxillary” power plant which brings the city’s lights back to normal.

Tight domestic supply, strong automotive demand and high raw material costs have already helped European strip steel prices balloon in Q4. But some market participants suspect the initiation of an anti-dumping investigation into Chinese hot-dipped galvanized sheet could see that market “explode.”

Strip steel prices generally are expected to remain firm for much of the first half of the year, with European mills switching their defense of higher offer prices from the burden of raw material costs, to the tightness in supply.

In January, the price of oil was moldering — below $30/b on occasion. Given Russia’s dependence on oil and gas revenue, the budgetary outlook was bleak. Hillary Clinton was going to be elected as the next president of the United States. Sanctions against Russia, imposed over its role in the Ukraine conflict, would continue, and the EU would further frustrate Russian plans for major new gas pipelines and its goal of a total Ukrainian bypass.

Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday to You” to US President John F. Kennedy in 1962 is famous. What is little known is that her rendition was partly about the steel industry.

The mills had just announced a $6 a ton price increase, about 3.5%, despite a tacit agreement with Kennedy that there would be no such move. The Kennedy administration was worried about inflation and had just intervened to help the industry settle a no-wage-hike contract with the United Steelworkers union.

Eighteen years ago, the International Energy Agency made an alarming and, by its own admission, controversial prediction. Global conventional oil output would peak well before 2020, it said, based on global oil reserve modeling of the day.

Pondering the potential repercussions of Peak Oil for the first time, the West’s energy watchdog concluded that the world would need to rely increasingly on future supplies of so-called unconventional oil.